Bata chased Italy's shopping malls for a decade — then the rent caught up

Bata, the footwear group founded in 1894, spent recent years pulling its Italian stores out of town-centre high streets and into shopping malls, chasing the higher footfall those malls offered. In the summer of 2024 the company told Italy's labour ministry it planned a wave of closures 'for redundancy reasons' affecting stores across the country — the same mall locations it had bet on.

In Ferrara, Bata shut its city-centre store, then in January 2025 closed the twin location at the Le Valli mall in Porto Garibaldi on the last day of the winter sales, giving its three long-serving, permanent-contract staff two years of wage-guarantee protection before they would need to find new work. A union official said the mall leases behind the closures had simply become 'altissimi' — too high — after years of rising commercial rents.

The union representing the affected workers, Filcams-Cgil, said the dispute was national rather than local, tied to closures happening at Bata stores 'all over Italy' since mid-2024. No insolvency was behind the closures — union and press coverage described a company profitable enough to keep investing globally while still finding its Italian mall footprint too costly to hold.